Chapter 103: Medusa
Her hand against his chest felt like it was sending faint sparks straight through his body, a strange, tingling warmth that spread outward from the single point of contact.
It crawled up through his ribs and settled somewhere behind his sternum, foreign and unfamiliar, nothing like any sensation he had ever felt before.
For a few seconds, Leon was left completely speechless, his mind going utterly blank, every thought he’d been holding onto scattering the instant her palm touched him.
Then, almost on pure instinct, his hand shot up and grabbed onto her wrist.
He stepped back sharply, putting as much distance between them as he could manage in that single motion, his heart hammering against his chest for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.
"What are you doing?" he muttered, his voice low and tight with wariness, his grip firm around her wrist even as some part of him hesitated to hold on too tightly.
The woman clicked her tongue softly in response, a faint pout tugging at the corner of her lips.
"You’re no fun Leon," she said, the words carrying a light, teasing edge to them, as if his caution amused her more than it bothered her.
He never even noticed the exact moment her wrist slipped free from his grip.
One second she was standing right in front of him, close enough to touch, and the next, she had vanished entirely, disappearing without so much as a shift of air or the faintest sound to mark her movement.
Before he could react, he felt her presence reappear somewhere behind him instead.
Leon spun around quickly, his body tensing on reflex, only to find her standing there with her back turned to him, facing away, perfectly still, as though she hadn’t moved at all.
That was when he noticed her long green hair beginning to move on its own. It rose slowly into the air, strand by strand, drifting as if caught in some breeze that touched nothing else around them.
Slowly, each lock began to twist and shift, elongating and thickening until they had transformed completely into thin, green serpents, their small fangs glinting sharply in the soft golden light of the field.
She turned back around to face him then, and her hair, now a writhing mass of hissing snakes, moved with her, each one baring its fangs toward him with quiet, restless hostility, hissing softly into the still air between them.
Leon froze completely at the sight, his breath catching hard in his throat, his entire body locking in place.
Then it hit him.
He had seen something very identical to this before, etched carefully into the surface of his own shield.
The very same woman’s face, the very same serpentine hair coiling outward, sat right at the center of Aegis, a detail he had glanced past a hundred times without ever truly registering it.
’I knew her face looked familiar...’ he thought, the realization settling over him slowly as the pieces clicked together in his mind.
The woman smiled lightly at him, her bright green eyes gleaming with quiet amusement as she watched the recognition spread visibly across his face.
"What now, Leon," she said, her voice soft and lilting, teasing him gently. "You recognize me now?"
"Yeah, I do," he said, nodding slightly.
He looked around once more, letting his gaze sweep across the endless stretch of grass and flowers surrounding them, his eyes narrowing slightly as something about the place tugged at his memory.
He couldn’t help but think back to the strange dimension Arthur had once summoned him to, where the legendary king had looked him over and coldly declared him unworthy to wield Excalibur.
The memory of that humiliation still sat uncomfortably in the back of his mind, sharp and clear even now.
As he studied the field stretching out endlessly in every direction, with no visible end or boundary anywhere in sight, he realized just how similar this place felt to that dimension.
The same eerie, boundless quality, like he was standing somewhere that existed outside the normal rules of the world.
’Does this mean each legendary item has some kind of spirit in them...’ he thought, the pieces beginning to click together in his head, ’related to their history?’
It made sense, in a strange way. If Excalibur carried the spirit of Arthur Pendragon within it, then perhaps every legendary item carried something similar, some fragment of the figure tied to its legend, waiting quietly inside until it chose to reveal itself.
He turned back to the woman, studying her more carefully now, piecing together everything he knew about the shield and its origins.
"So you’re... Athena, I guess," he said, his tone carrying a note of cautious certainty, as if he were fairly confident he had finally figured it out.
The woman’s face twitched visibly at his words, her earlier composed expression cracking for just a brief moment. She looked genuinely shocked, almost offended, by what he had just said.
Then, slowly, a smile crept onto her face, one that somehow sent a small chill down Leon’s spine despite how gentle it appeared on the surface.
There was something sharp hidden underneath it, something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
"How..." she said slowly, her voice carrying a dangerous edge beneath its usual melodic softness, "...could you even think I’m Athena?"
Leon gulped hard, immediately sensing that he had said something wrong, though he wasn’t entirely sure what.
"Sorry..." he muttered quickly, holding his hands up slightly in a small, instinctive gesture of surrender. "I made a mistake..."
He had simply assumed, based on the pattern he’d noticed with Excalibur, that since its spirit had turned out to be Arthur Pendragon himself, the spirit residing within the Ring of Aegis would naturally be the goddess Athena.
It had seemed like a reasonable assumption at the time, especially since the description stated that it was made by her.
But judging by the look on her face now, that assumption had clearly been very, very wrong.
For some reason, Leon could sense a faint trace of sadness buried beneath the bitterness in her voice when she’d mentioned the name Athena, hidden just beneath the surface of her otherwise composed expression.
"Then..." he said slowly, choosing his words with more care this time, "who are you?"
"I’m Medusa," she replied with a small smile on her face.
Leon went silent for a moment, the name echoing through his mind without landing anywhere useful.
’Who the hell is Medusa?’ he thought, his brows furrowing slightly as he tried to place it.
The goddess Athena had already been confusing enough on her own, some figure he barely knew anything about beyond a vague, half-remembered impression. And now there was another name entirely, Medusa, sitting right alongside it, equally unfamiliar.
He didn’t know anything about either of them, not really, and that only made the entire situation feel more disorienting than it already was.
He stood there quietly, running through what little he could recall, coming up mostly empty.
’I really should...’ he thought, filing the realization away for later, ’...learn about these names and where they actually originate from.’
Medusa clicked her tongue softly, watching him with an expression that mixed faint amusement with something closer to disbelief.
"You really don’t know anything," she muttered, shaking her head slightly. "It’s strange how the ring even ended up in your hands in the first place."
Before Leon could respond, she vanished from his sight again, disappearing in that same silent, instantaneous way she had before.
He barely had time to react before he felt her reappear directly behind him, her hands slowly coming to rest against his back.
"I can’t remember the last time I saw a person, though," she said quietly, her voice softer now, almost distant, as if she were speaking more to herself than to him. "Feels like thousands of years have passed since then..."
Leon shivered slightly at the touch, her palms cool and light against his back, and he fought the urge to pull away again.
’Why does she have to be so... touchy?’ he thought, holding himself still despite the discomfort creeping up his spine.
He could feel the faint weight of her presence lingering close behind him, unmoving, as though she were simply content to stand there for a while, her hands resting quietly against him without any clear intention behind it.
The stillness stretched on longer than he expected, and he found himself unsure whether he should step away or wait for her to speak again.
Her words replayed in his mind, thousands of years, and he couldn’t help but wonder just how long she had actually been trapped inside the ring, cut off from everything and everyone, watching the world move on without her from somewhere far outside it.
The thought carried a strange weight to it, heavier than he expected given how little he actually knew about her.
He glanced down briefly at his own hand, the one that had worn the Ring of Aegis through everything he’d faced so far, and wondered just how much history was quietly bound up inside it.